Jim Scutti is very clear: When asked if he retired from his career as an attorney to take up poetry, he emphatically says the writing came first.
Today, he continues to pursue that first love. And like many careers, his requires retooling, which he does through writing workshops across the country.
He just wrapped up one close to home though national in its reach: a three-week residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, under the tutelage of Richard Blanco, the inaugural poet for President Obama’s second term and considered one of the finest American poets writing today.
Scutti applied for the residency in part because he met Blanco’s criteria: poets whose works have reached a “critical mass,” worthy of being published as a first book or chapbook.
For the first half of the workshop, the eight residents met as a group, going over each other’s manuscripts of a dozen or so poems. Scutti recalls his assignment: “ ‘Tell a little story,’ Richard Blanco said. That’s not my style; I usually write stand-alone poems. For this, it had to have a theme.”
In the second half, the poets worked on revising their books-to-be. That process continued long after Scutti came home to Vero.
“I wrote before I was ever a lawyer,” says Scutti. “I had stories published way back in the mid ‘70s. I never lost touch with wanting to be a writer, first and foremost.”
That is not to say that in nine years working in enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission in Miami, followed by 22 years in private practice in Boca Raton, he didn’t get the chance to practice writing. For most attorneys, facility with language is an essential skill.
“I did a heck of a lot of writing,” he says. “Complaints, briefs — original writing, not canned stuff. I developed a sophistication in terms of good general writing practices, but not good writing practices when it comes to writing fiction or poetry, which is really different.”
The biggest roadblock to pursing his passion was that his job was all-consuming. “I always had a foot in the door in creative writing, but I never had the time. When you’re working 60 hour work weeks, plus all the emotional involvement with the case, that takes a lot out of you.”
Lawyering can produce some bad habits, he says. “In fiction and poetry, you really have to let things go. If you have to explain it, there’s something wrong with it. I can always tell in workshops who’s a lawyer: they’re always explaining.“
When someone questions a detail or a reference in a short story – his preferred form of fiction writing – the writer risks losing the reader altogether, he says. “In a short story, you don’t have any time for error. You’ve got to move forward. If they’ve stopped at something, it’s because they don’t like the story.”
But his law career did produce good work habits for Scutti. As a poet and author, he is disciplined, writing for three hours daily. Workshops like New Smyrna’s are an infusion of inspiration.
““When I come back from these seminars, I’m always writing for a month or two afterwards.”
Scutti, who has already published 16 poems in literary magazines, hopes to combine two chapbooks, typically half the size of a standard volume of poetry, into his first full-sized book. He will not self-publish, though. “There’s a stigma to that,” he says.
Along with writing, he is a disciplined reader, not just of newspapers and magazines, but of literature. Currently he’s studying Chinese philosophy, to better understand the poetry of the Chinese poet known as Cold Mountain, and because of his admiration for W.S. Merwin, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning poet who is a student of Buddhism.
Scutti is the son of Italian immigrants. Born in Pennsylvania, he graduated from Temple University in 1966 expecting to become a teacher. He ended up in the military, spending two years in Germany, then a year in Vietnam.
It was a difficult time. “Poetry helped me survive the crisis of anxiety and fear that I had during my years in the army. I was amazed that there was a force in the world as powerful as poetry. I knew then that I wanted to be a writer and began writing poetry and fiction.”
Scutti first drove the two hours north to New Smyrna in January to check out the Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Blue Flower Arts Winter Writer’s Workshop. “I got to see what the place was like and when a residency came up that seemed to fit what I had in mind, I applied.”
Only eight people were accepted to the poetry residency – in all, last year 96 artists were accepted out of 350 applications. The eight poets shared the compound of classrooms and efficiencies with participants in two other workshops, one in music composition, and one in visual arts.
The arts center is nestled in a stunning 70-acre setting of cabbage palms and marshlands linked with raised wooden walkways. Scutti’s was the 154th workshop since the center opened in 1982; its inaugural master artists were author James Dickey, sculptor Duane Hanson and composer David Del Tredici.
Works developed in the artist-in-residency program have gone on to Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, the Museum of Modern Art, Charleston’s Spoleto Festival and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts.
For Scutti, it was his 25th writing workshop. At $900 for three weeks including room and board, New Smyrna’s program is a great value, he says, and financial aid is available, including a special program to help artists who are parents.
Scutti says many of his fellow students are actually teachers and professors themselves, and others have graduate degrees in literature and creative writing.
“They go there to renew themselves, and to get new ideas to teach their students,” he says. As for Scutti, it’s professional development.
“This is my career,” he says. “This is what I’ve always wanted to do.”